NSA’s ANT division — specializing in inserting itself into the global security architecture so they can spy on you through your iPhone microphone, etc — has a catalogue! The names of these end-user devices and software are funky. They sound like band names, almost. If they were band names, would would they sound like? EBSR: Post-dubstep, dark […]
Anti-NSA surveillance protest group “Restore the Fourth” has successfully adopted a section of highway that will neighbor a new heavily guarded data center. This particular stretch of suburban highway cuts directly through a National Guard base the future home of this Salt Lake City data center location. Members of the group plan to maintain the highway as expected […]
Remember those billboards that popped up around town last week, ostensibly advertising things like the NSA and internet regulation? We knew the ads were part of a teaser campaign, and now, BitTorrent, Inc. is taking responsibility. That’s a lot more interesting than I was expecting. The company unmasked itself today by altering the ads to […]
Artist and composer Ben Grosser created a new Google Chrome extension that, when enabled, automatically adds a passage of additional algorithmically generated text to your emails containing many of the keywords known to trigger the National Security Agency‘s email surveillance systems. This extension, in theory, works as a trap to not only force these systems to […]
“Your data should belong to the NSA,” reads a new billboard on West Broadway near Canal Street. There’s no indication of who put it up–just that phrase, all-caps, against a plain white background. It’s the kind of sly commentary one might expect from Banksy, if he wasn’t busy painting dogs peeing on things. A similar […]
To create Pot Shots, their aptly-titled photo zine, Ryan Mungia and Jim Heimann simply drove around with their iPhones. Whenever they saw a cannabis dispensary, they’d snap a cell phone pic from the car, then keep driving. The photos are sparse and strictly documentarian, showing the dispensaries as they’d appear on any normal day. To hear Mungia tell it, […]
The National Security Agency has recently posted a new full-time job opening for “Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer.” This position is the first of its kind, likely created in response to the NSA’s recent — not so recent — blatant spying on US citizens. The NSA Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer (CLPO) is conceived as a completely new role, combining the […]
Flagger is a Chrome extension that adds potential NSA keywords to every URL you visit, just to give a little trolly “fuck you” to the any feds that may be watching. As I write this, for example, the URL for ANIMAL’s back end has “?lulz=regime+warfare+MSP” tacked to the end of it. I just refreshed, and […]
In Moscow, eight members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were detained for holding an illegal rally. While the world the internet is familiar with the Pastafarian movement as a parody religion against the literal interpretation of scripture — magical Jesus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. — in Russia, shit gets realer. The Church of FSP […]
The NSA leaks of the past few months have united a pretty amazing cross-section of people, on all shades of the political spectrum, against federal government surveillance. Case in point: Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt, the host of a Christian YouTube show called Pray in Jesus Name, recently devoted a segmented to praying away the “satanic, evil spirit” […]
